5 Key Things We Learned at PI Live Europe 2023

This week, members of the global Affiverse Agency team convened in London for one of the industry highlights of the year – PI Live Europe 2023. Thousands of affiliate marketing professionals made their way to Old Billingsgate for two days (and nights) of networking, insights and memory making.

The atmosphere was vibrant and bright blue autumn skies shone down as we enjoyed catching up with our industry peers on the terrace, as well as welcoming many of them to our meeting nook. Key conversations were had. It was evident that relationship-building is still the key to success, as we celebrated our industry growth together.

We were delighted to see our name in lights, with a ‘Highly Commended’ win at the Global Performance Marketing Awards 2023 on Monday evening. A huge thank you to all those who took the time to drop by and give us such rewarding feedback.

Here are the top 5 key take aways we’ve had from this year’s busy event:

Now, more than ever, customers are seeking value for money. It’s important not to discount these kinds of affiliate partners in your program segmentation mix. Customers are actively seeking added value especially now in this recessionary climate. We caught up with Lux Rewards and understood how card linked offers are growing customer revenues because of the incremental data insights that can be leveraged from these types of publisher relationships. Brands that are digging deep into their data are leveraging growth at a rapid rate.

Revving is redefining how sales revenues are accessed in the digital age. They empower digital businesses to take control of their cashflows, through a suite of fully automated solutions. Online trading businesses, paid media publishers and even agencies working in affiliate marketing – can wait sometimes up to 90 – 120 days or more to receive payment for purchases made through third-party platforms or their commissions because of the returns order processes that exist and the way commissions are paid. These revenue streams often comprise high volumes of small payments in multiple currencies, making the task of managing cashflows to fund business operations and invest in future growth challenging. Why wait? Revving is transforming the speed with which payments are made across affiliate and performance marketing allowing publishers to re-invest their earnings into driving more sales for your business.

These interactions were prominent in our discussions at the show especially for SaaS products that have long been leveraging the value of partnerships, but now we’re seeing e-commerce bands partner up with payment providers to leverage communal databases to increase incrementally of sales. The potential for these partnerships in comparison to traditional affiliate relationships can really open up avenues to benefit from partnership data and is becoming a real game changer for many smaller brands to leverage growth early on in their affiliate program lifecycle.

PI LIVE’s first ever Voicebox was hugely successful. Julia Linehan from The Digital Voice hosted a session on Female Leaders and was joined by a number of inspiring women as they discussed barriers at work. Affiverse Founder, Lee-Ann Johnstone, highlighted the need for people in marginalised communities to have access to mentors and people who can coach them on building confidence in their skills and execution within the workplace to drive their careers forward: “Once we find and retain good talent we want them to be able to get on stage and be visible so they can be role models to other people.” She also gave a sneak preview of what she thought the next 10 years in Affiliate Marketing may look like – no surprises this included AI changing the way we automate management processes but relationships still being a key component of how this industry will evolve.

5. AI: Advancements for 2024

AI continues to march forward. We learnt that we will see AI advance operations and data insights with technology innovations. Thus enabling brands to manage their partners precisely in order to improve profit margins and resource efficiencies.